Roadmap for in­ter­na­tional trans­port

The lo­gis­tics strat­egy is a blue­print de­signed to trans­form Oman into a top 10 lo­gis­tics hub by the year 2040. It in­cludes in­vest­ments in in­fra­struc­ture and new tech­nol­ogy to up­grade ports, air­port fa­cil­i­ties, and new road links. Al Harthy’s words seemed to echo those of Al Fu­taisi, who said that Oman and the rest of the world would need to evolve to keep up with ex­ist­ing busi­ness trends.

“With the evo­lu­tion of dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies that trans­formed busi­ness mod­els and re­de­fined in­dus­tries, it is ex­pected that the world will wit­ness con­sid­er­able growth in new and al­ter­na­tive skills due to the in­creased de­mand for this cat­e­gory of tal­ent,” he said. Global spe­cial­ists from the lo­gis­tics in­dus­try will fo­cus on sev­eral is­sues dur­ing the IRU World Congress and sug­gest rec­om­men­da­tions, which will be submitted at the end of the con­fer­ence to help de­fine the fu­ture roadmap for road trans­port and in­ter­na­tional trade routes.

Keep pace

Al Fu­taisi added, “The IRU World Congress will de­lib­er­ate on how pol­icy mak­ers will be able to keep pace with the rapid changes in the lo­gis­tics tech­nolo­gies, how to adopt them with ap­pli­ca­ble laws and poli­cies, and how the next gen­er­a­tion plat­forms will change the labour laws in the road trans­port sec­tor. The ses­sions will tackle fu­ture tech­nolo­gies, con­sid­er­ing the mix of elec­tric and hy­drogen­op­er­ated heavy-duty ve­hi­cles on one hand and ve­hi­cles us­ing diesel and gas, in ad­di­tion to hy­brid ve­hi­cles on the other.”

Among is­sues that will be ad­dressed is how com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments will be able to at­tract tal­ent to the in­dus­try and build a pool of qual­i­fied and ex­pe­ri­enced em­ploy­ees who pos­sess the knowl­edge and skills fit for the fu­ture. The del­e­gates will also dis­cuss how to re­tain these in­di­vid­u­als in a rapidly chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment.